CIO year in review

Digital took centre stage this year for many CIOs, who helped lead their organisations through some form of transformation.

In the 2015 State of the CIO survey, more than 25 per cent of 187 CIOs led a product innovation effort this year, compared to just 6 per cent in 2014.

Cloud services were cited by almost 50 per cent respondents as being a key initiative driving technology investment this year. This was followed by mobile technologies (39 per cent), big data and business intelligence (36 per cent), application modernisation (36 per cent), and customer experience technologies (32 per cent).

“Bitcoin is a protocol which is now being replicated by non-asset based vendors like Ripple and others. We absolutely see that’s where it’s going to go. The bank has a role to play in that,” he said.

Westpac invested $1.3 billion in digital transformation to improve the customer experience, consolidate infrastructure and move more into a hybrid cloud environment. CIO David Curran said he wants to enable greater opportunities for cross-channel conversations with customers, and to put the customer at the centre of technology development.

ANZ brought IBM on board for the development of a new innovation hub, which will use IBM’s Bluemix platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering to build, test and deploy new applications and services faster and cheaper. The agreement will also deliver software to support customers making transactions across multiple channels.

NAB launched a digital advice platform, NAB Prosper, for customers who don't have an active relationship with a financial adviser. The computer-generated financial assistance platform will be rolled out to 40,000 internet banking customers as of early October, with plans to eventually offer it to the bank's entire customer base.

The CIO of ME (a mobile and online bank), Mark Gray, talked about the completion of a $90 million, five-year IT transformation in becoming a fully digital bank. The bank rolled out a Temenos T24 core banking platform, providing a single customer record.

Phyllis Post, CIO of MSD, talked about the global pharmaceutical organisation’s ongoing transformation since 2013. “Data has become critical inside and outside our organisation, and understanding that data to better address our core focus as a business.”

When it comes to supporting transformation and digital services, Edith Cowan University’s CIO, Elizabeth Wilson, looked at next-generation infrastructure to provide rich multimedia learning experiences to students, faculty and staff across its campuses.

Artificial intelligence is important to the future of computing, he said, as we've spent years just pre-programming computers and giving instructions to computers to carry out certain functions or tasks.

“Computers have never really theoretically in the past ... programmed themselves. And how do we program ourselves? What is the term for that? It is learning,” he said.

“When you learn, you program yourself, even when you were a baby just learning how to hold a spoon or something. You are programming yourself and computers will get to that stage.”

Google, Baidu, Facebook, IBM, Apple and Microsoft are all big investors of AI.

Facebook, for example, revealed in April 2015 at its F8 developer conference that its memory network can read a short term version of Lord of the Rings in 15 sentences and have it answer questions on ‘where is Frodo?’ and ‘where is the ring now?

It also built a deep learning system, trained in an unsupervised manner, which can automatically create its own images of objects and animals from photographs.

Facebook also announced its AI assistant M, which will sit alongside Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana.

“One of the things that annoyed me the most in the corporate world was the bureaucracy and the slowness of decision making,” she said, on the contrast between how corporates and startups operate. “Most organisations have a very stringent process when it comes to new projects.”

Another former CIO who started his own business is Jacob Dudzinski. He joined forces with ex-CMO Mats Johnson to build their startup, Wifi Control.

It all started when both Dudzinski and Johnson crossed paths at the same workplace, assisting with another startup business in data migration.

After going through a rough start in developing his idea, technology wise, Johnson asked Dudzinski for his thoughts and that’s when the CMO and CIO became a dynamic duo on their own.

“My skills complement Mats and Mats’ skills complement mine. There is an overlap in the way that we think through issues and business questions. There’s overlap in some of our general business management skills and commercial skills, but we bring different prior knowledge of business areas together,” said Dudzinski.

Since becoming PM, Turnbull announced a $1.1 billion innovation plan, of which $106 million will go to tax incentives for investors in early stage startup companies, $75 million to the CSIRO/Data61, $250 million to a Biomedical Translation Fund over four years, and $30 million to establish an industry-led Cyber Security Growth Centre.

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